I didn't think I'd wrap this one up before the end of the year, but this game was a lot shorter than I anticipated. I have such vague memories of watching my older sister playing this game on the PS2 back then, Quina's theme was basically etched into my brain because she spent so much time catching frogs from what I remember. By the time I got to my first Qu's Marsh in my playthrough, it was like I was hit with the enlightenment stick and then raptured right then and there. I remember trying so hard to beat this game myself back then too, but I was too stupid to figure out the first plant boss and thought that the game was fucking impossible, so I gave up. My child self has officially been avenged, but that was in like.. the first hour of the game. How was the rest?

It was very close to perfect in my eyes, from start to finish. The plot is so fittingly Shakespearean, so fluidly tragic and comedic ala Midsummer's Night Dream. Just a group of hooligans befriending each other on the way to killing a God in such JRPG fashion. It's a trope, but it's a trope that I love and this game served that up on a silver platter. There was a very effective emotional punch to the game's themes about individuality and personal existence that resonated with me. It was filled with so much empathy and heartfelt bond that actually grows as the plot moves forward. Some of the characters do stupid as shit things, but it's effectively told through the bittersweet enveloping of the narrative. The twists are gut wrenching to the characters and they're acting in ways rational to them. There's a lot of darkness and death, but also a lot of moments of light peeking in that I really appreciated. I was also a theatre kid after all, it's in the roots of my personality that make me omega cringe.

I like the character's a lot for the most part. There are clearly some that are more integral than others, but those characters help balance out the dreary with some comic whimsy. I couldn't help but exhale air out of my nose every time Quina randomly appeared on screen and I applaud them for being a Blue Mage that is actually useful. I could do with some more fleshing out of specific characters though. Amarant is the last party member you get fairly deep into the game and his motivations for following the party are pretty flimsy. He doesn't have the charm or helpfulness in combat that Quina has for me to be like, "That's a character that's doing stuff", so most of the time I was like, "Why's this guy still here?" instead. Garnet needed to give a little more, she's like almost a perfect character to me (story-wise) but then the game gives her plot MUTENESS and literally shuts her up and deletes her dialogue for a whole disc of story. That and there being another character that is the same class as her, but objectively way better in combat for plot reasons, she ended up getting sidelined near the end for me. Those are really the only character gripes I had, but I will say that Square finally crafted a love story that didn't make my eyes roll out of my head.

There's some fantastic scenes in this game that are hampered down a bit by the game having old disease, and I'm looking forward to seeing those scenes revitalized in the supposed remake of this game that's being made. I really think the character's and emotional beats of the story could thrive with a little more oomph injected into the writing and it's exciting to think about it. (If they don't fuck it up, of course.) I should note that I don't think this game needs a remake, but since one has already been heavily rumored, I guess this review is what I hope they would add/change in it. I'm not the biggest fan of FF7 Remake or FF16's more action-oriented combat, so I pray they don't just copy paste those systems into this one. Anyways..

So yeah, the story slaps cheeks red, but for the gameplay? I would say it's more positive than bad, but I do have complaints that I'm noticing have been spewed out before on here, so let me just add my own vomit to that pile really quick. Yeah, the combat is really slow. It's super duper slow. There's a reason why so many people complain about it. It's not even really the battle animations or the 360 no scope camera zoom ins at the start of each battle that bother me, it's moreso the fact that when I cast spell buffs onto my party, they're already completely expired by the time it's my White Mage's turn again so it kind of felt to me like giving your party buffs was a useless waste of a turn for the majority of the time. At first I actually thought that you couldn't cast buffs on multiple people at a time and it turned out that wasn't the case, it was literally just the first buff expiring before I even got a chance to cast it again because the battle timer doesn't pause during the crazy ass battle animations from each enemy, summon, and character on screen. I know that there's a speed up function that came with this port but I didn't like using it because it made the battles overwhelming. It's harder to focus on what is happening and it would just make the buffs expire even faster, so there was no point unless I was grinding.

Also, Trance is kind of.... uh... ass? I like the idea of it, sure, but it's just a watered down Limit Break that you can't control. There's no way to stop the gauge from filling and there's no way to prevent it from happening, so most of the time when Trance happened it would be in a normal battle where Steiner cleaves a poor goblin in half but then doesn't budge an inch during a life or death fight against a boss who wants to eat our innards. Or, someone Trances on the same turn that the enemy dies so it gets completely wasted entirely. It came in clutch for some instances for sure and I like that it's a brief steroid for all of the characters, but the uncontrollable nature of it definitely ruins it as a mechanic.

I do really enjoy the ability mechanic in this game because it reminded me of Bravely Default's ability mechanic in a way. The difference here is that the abilities are leveled up through the use of each character's weapons, so when they kill a certain amount of enemies with said weapon, they'll be able to use that ability permanently without it. I like it a lot, but I also think it could be better to be honest. The plot is constantly ripping the characters away from each other and separating them all the time, so there's some segments where you're forced to use a set of 2 or 4 for hours, and I don't mind that in a story sense at all, but it left some of the characters in the dust when it came to their abilities. By the time you get some of them back, they're under leveled and missing abilities that you'd have to grind to get because the stores would have updated weapons with stronger attributes but different abilities attached to them. Maybe it's more my fault for not grinding them out at every chance I had, but it's not like the game outright warns you that you won't be using character X once your toe touches this specific pixel of the place you're in. Overall though, I find these complaints to be really minor and the story makes me forget about them for the most part in the first place.

This concludes my review of Square's Final Fantasy IX released in 2000 for the Sony Playstation 1! Now I am going to review Square-Enix's Final Fantasy IX released in 2016 as a port for PC:

THIS PORT IS ABSOLUTE DONKEY PISS!!
I wish so bad that I could have played the original, but I have no way of obtaining it so I have to play with this beat up, chewed on, curb stomped, crumpled, doo doo ass version instead. This port looks so.. bad, man. What the fuck happened? Apparently it's a port of a port made for MOBILE? and you can tell. The backgrounds look like the crusty, ambiguous paste I can find on the pavement of a Floridian parking lot. It's so bad that there's literally a whole modding team that had to overhaul the graphics on this game just to make them slightly better. They did the absolute best they could do, but it's still so hard to see what is an interactable object on screen when it's blended in so harshly with the pre-rendered backgrounds that look as bad as that. I find it so ironically comical that Square would give Garnet a high-definition ass on her character model, but won't change the overworld model of Madain Sari even slightly so you can tell it's an enterable place and not a crusty dog shit you can't interact with.

I honestly really don't care that much for graphix, but it's so grating to play this game on a monitor that's bigger than a 4:3 box, because you can literally see the character's blip in and out of cutscenes off to the side where you're not supposed to and it's really annoying. The special effects don't leave that ratio either, so when you get flashbanged by a boss, there's just a white square covering the middle of the screen while you can still see the outskirts of it. It's just awful.

To top it off, my game crashed in the transition between the final dialogue and the ending CGI cutscene right after I finally beat the final boss, so I had to watch the ending on Youtube instead. The game doesn't acknowledge that I beat it because of this and if you think I'm getting my ass pounded by the final boss for 3 hours straight again, you are fucking wrong, bucko.

Anyways, I like this game a lot and I really hope the remake isn't a lie because I'd play the hell out of it. It's not my favorite Final Fantasy ever, (I still think mine is 10) but it's definitely up there. My complaints are super minor and I don't want to change my score on it just because I played the port instead of the OG, but holy shit, just play the OG version if you can. Square did this one so dirty and it's a bit of a shame.